Happy Birthday!

3 years ago today, I started writing this blog.

From my perspective, it’s been one of the best things I’ve done, and of course I plan to continue.

How has it been for you?

Cancel Culture

The factory pictured here isn’t an old relic.  A few months ago it was home to a growing light industrial business, manufacturing variations of the thing they invented back in the ’60s.   They were evicted to make way for a residential investment opportunity.

The same is happening all around this part of the Old Kent Road.  Not just to factories, but to car-maintenance workshops, independent logistics firms and pentecostal churches.   Around a 1,000 jobs in total, spread across a 100 small independent firms – who want to grow, if only they could find the space.

We’re used to thinking of the North and Midlands as being our centres of manufacturing, but London has always had more of it, just lighter, and spread over a larger area.

But residential tower blocks yield higher returns.   So, slowly, all evidence that real businesses making real things for real people actually existed here will be gone.

It is possible to mix light industrial and residential, or office and residential, to build places for people to live and work.   That’s happening in Zurich – the ultimate money-metropolis.

But clearly that involves acknowledging a manufacturing culture.

It’s easier to erase it.  No matter what the long-term cost.

Managing without managers

I found this excellent article by Michele Zanini yesterday: ‘Can we manage without managers?’. It’s well worth a read, but … Read More “Managing without managers”

Anonymity

There’s something very attractive about anonymity.   It’s one of the pleasures of living in a town – you can wander unrecognised, without meeting anyone you know.

The real problem with villages – or any village-sized community – is not that “everyone knows everyone else’s business“, but that the consequence of that is a heavy load of emotional labour.  You can’t walk down the street without having to greet someone, ask after them, take an interest in their affairs, respond to their interest in yours.  You have to see them, recognise them as co-habitants, consider their needs in your decisions.  Everything becomes a negotiation between you and your neighbours.

If you think that village life is bad, imagine what it would be like if every living thing was also an honorary person.  If every tree, rabbit, and dandelion was a neighbour, requiring you to take an interest in their affairs, and taking an interest in yours.

Now add in ancestors, and you’ve got a recipe for emotional exhaustion, because trees, rabbits, dandelions and dead people don’t communicate their desires very clearly, so it’s easy to be wrong.

No wonder we leapt at the chance to have someone take this burden off our shoulders.  To appoint a priest or a king whose sole job it was to deal with all these matters, so we can just get on with our day-to-day lives, able to treat the wildlife and the ghosts as strangers, saving our emotional labour for our living neighbours.

We’ve gone much further than that since, of course.   Now even our neighbours are strangers.  Amazon and Just-Eat, Mondelez and JBS S.A. have replaced priests and kings, taking care of all those matters we don’t want to be burdened with, hiding what we don’t want to see.   Our connection to the trees, rabbits and dandelions has been attenuated almost to nothing.  Our villages are empty.

There’s a downside to anonymity of course.   After a while, you long to be seen, to be recognised as a human being, to be known again.   We long for the company of people who know everything about us.  We want to feel at home.

We can’t go back.  Perhaps we have to create a new kind of village.